Tag: Input/output

Thanks to the wonders of the WaybackMachineLebedev watchers can track what everybody’s favorite Russian designer has in his office at temporal markers AB C and D. If you open these links in different tabs of your Firefox browser (you are not using IE still, are you?) you can use a technique that astronomers call “blinking” to see the changes in Tema’s fine equipment.

The most puzzling change is from B to C to D. It looks like he didn’t like the new Herman Miller Mira and went back to good ol’ Aeron. I am surprised that he isn’t using dual monitors yet.

Also notice how the picture on the monitor does not reflect the changes up to D.

So far the only exact matches to my equipment is the chair and the wastebasket. My Intuos2 is a smaller 4×5, my Griffin powermate is black, not silver, my camera is a cheaper but better Digital Rebel, instead of post-its I use a police memo binder with a reporter’s pad inside, my keyboard, trackball and mouse are made by Logitech, the dual screens are Viewsonic VP171b, the computer is a Shuttle XPC. My cigar ashtray which gets used only a few times a month is made out of radium glass. My cellphone is cheap and looks like a brick, but thanks to all those Verizon towers that irradiate everyone around, has awesome reception. And for pens I use whatever is left from my office supply therapy.

On Saturday I’ve got the Engineer’s Itch. You know, the itch to take apart something that is working perfectly well and try to improve it. To scratch it I added a second video card and a monitor to my computer.

All I had in my box-o-junk was an old video card and a crappy 15 inch monitor, but even with that a dual monitor desktop is absolutely awesome. It works really great with Photoshop – I can move all the annoying toolbars to the left screen. I also moved the mess of shortcuts, install files and folders with junk to the left. Now my main desktop is very clean and organized.

It’s great for having multiple browser windows open, doing some reading during long and annoying installs (you can have a non-resizable window on the first monitor and another one on the second). Ok, next step is to buy decent lcd monitors and setting them up like that. I don’t want to go back to a single monitor setup.

You’ll see, you’ll see. We will be all using memexes instead of the horrible pee-cees of today. It looks like even hardware is moving in that direction now. The first harbinger – dual displays are becoming almost commonplace.

For years it was possible to stick more than one video card into a box, hook a few monitors and have a two screened desktop in most modern windowing systems. Even Windows. Especially Windows.

But having two huge CRT monitors is not a picnic – they took up too much desk space, generated too much heat. And don’t forget radiation. But guess what – lcds are dirt cheap these days. Well, maybe if gold containing ore was dirt, but still they are kind of affordable. And multi flat monitor setups are so fricking amazing!

The perfect keyboard. A geek’s holy grail. And I am not immune to the siren’s call of this insane quest.

If you think that there isn’t much innovation in the field of alphanumeric input devices, you are in for a surprise. If you don’t think so, then you’ll be less surprised.

There are four main schools of keyboarding thought:

1) Typewriter keyboards suck , if you are really hardcore, you should use chord keysets. A chord keyset is basically a keyboard that uses combinations of buttons (like chords on a piano) to encode letters and numbers. Since fingers don’t have to travel horizontally and vertically, tremendous typing speed can be achieved. Chorded keyset is somewhat similar, but not the same as a stenotype machine used by court stenographers. According to The Straight Dope stenotype training takes 2,700 class hours (some of the classes probably have to do with understanding law terminology and the like) and you have to type 225 words per minute at 95% – 98% accuracy to pass the state exam.

A historic moment: Engelbart uses his chord keyset to delete the first Spam.

Closeup of a keyset, or Small Black Hit’em Bugger Teeth as it’s known in Pigin English

The problem with chorded keyboards is the super steep learning curve and what’s even worse, the skill of typing in chords seems to quickly deteriorate without practice.

2) Then there are those who think that the root of evil is the QUERTY layout. I am yet to see a person who regularly uses Dvorak keyboard, and the whole superiority of it seems to be just a myth.

3) In the olden times there was the horror of The Space Cadet Keyboard. There were a few other devices that LISP programming aliens seemed to use. Truly bizarre geekery.

4) On the other end of the spectrum of weird keyboards are ultra expensive contraptions. Even though outrageous prices are binding this group together, the usefulness, good looks and coolness factors are all over the board for these. You have to be one rich (or fiscally irresponsible) geek to afford them. There are keyboards that are split in two, like this Kinesis keyboard that mounts on armrests. has one and likes it.
Then there is a truly scary keyboard from the same maker that has bowl shaped indentations for keys:
This $350 keyboard has vertical set keys. I think I saw somebody’s review of it which stated that using it hurts. A lot. And I think I believe that person.

Fingerworks this $339 keyboard that has gesture recognition. Apparently uses one right now. The learning curve seems to a bit steep according to his post.

I think that all of these far out solutions are a bit too much. Split keyboards are kind of nice though. That Kinesis keyboard is 133T, but I did fine with Natural Keyboard Elite.

I also had Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro which was discontinued (I think) is just like Elite, but with a row of buttons on top. Out of those buttons the volume control was very useful. In fact, the perfect keyboard in my opinion should have a set of buttons for volume control. I might get a Griffen Powermate for that purpose though. But at $45 it’s pricey. But cool. The rest of the soft buttons were mostly useless.

I wish I could map a button to a key combination that switches between keyboard layouts (Cyrillic and English), but that wasn’t possible with out of the box functionality. Some of the soft buttons are outright dangerous, like the crappy “sleep” button. If pressed by accident it would plunge all of your unsaved data into the buggy realm of Windows power management, the cursed ACPI.

Before then I experimented with a “clicky” keyboard. I purchased an IBM model 42H1292 aka The One True Keyboard. These Irish built mastodons capable of various feats of endurance have special spring loaded keys instead of wussy rubber membrane ones. Manly. Very manly. A click of The One True Keyboard can be heard for miles in an empty cubicle farm. But also a pain in the ass. Turned out I don’t like the clicky sound, the keys were getting stuck sometimes (even though I bought an unused, keyboard gravy free one).

Right now I am thinking of switching to a mini keyboard, like the Happy Hacking Keyboard. Right now I am typing this on a mini keyboard that my friend Dan lent me. It’s called MiniTouch. I has those IBM style clicky keys and a layout that with a little remapping could really work for me. Does anybody know a good Windows keyboard rempapper? The layout feature that I use the most is a function key that turns arrow keys into page up/down/home/end. Oh, and one thing that I do with all keyboards is turn off (by ripping out) the caps lock key. That thing is pure evil.